Btw, how popular is Savage Worlds? Do many groups play it? I honestly hadn't heard about it until now.
That's a good question. Relative to DnD? Nothing is popular. Relative to other TTRPG's? Pretty popular from what I can see. It's fully VTT supported, and there has been a massive influx of players converting over from Pathfinder and Palladium Rifts as both of those game systems are licensed and working with Pinnacle to keep their content rolling over seemingly in perpetuity.
Looking at the activity on both their forums and their Discord, Reddit etc. there are tons of people just like you, never heard of it, started playing it, and never went back. I'm one of those people. 40+ years of d20 including writing and development for Paizo and WotC and other third parties, then I played Deadlands back in Explorer Edition (the previous edition to the modern SWADE - Savage Worlds Adventurers Edition - edition) and knew 2-minutes into gameplay that this system could do DnD Fantasy better than DnD and any of its derivatives. I still consider myself a relative newcomer to Savage Worlds. I only wish I got here sooner.
I feel vindicated in that after making those claims the subsequent SWADE edition dropped and then Savage Rifts blew the doors off to show how high this system could scale in regular gameplay. And then when Savage Pathfinder dropped - since all the rules are compatible - it immediately showcased how to run a DnD fantasy game at levels virtually no one plays at except in rarified events. Very very few GM's can or even *want* to maintain a Pathfinder game post 15th lvl. Savage Pathfinder *can* do that level of gameplay without remotely breaking a sweat. And better it can maintain that level of play and *far* beyond that with relative ease.
Savage Worlds being a toolkit put the GM firmly at the wheel for easy rules and mechanics tweaking to fine-tune their game as they see fit. It scales ridiculously easier than d20 does and requires much less effort to run. I'm not saying it's rules-lite. It's low-mid-level crunch once you understand the very basic caveats to its mechanics. But it's far less rigorous than anything d20 and much easier to learn.
Which is exactly what most Pathfinder converts are saying (unsurprisingly) on Reddit and Pinnacle Discord. Frankly none of this surprises me from the Pathfinder crowd. Where I *WAS* shocked was the love Savage Worlds is getting from the Palladium Rifts fandom. Those guys are pretty hardcore, and Savage Rifts has won a lot of them over. So much so going forward all official Palladium products (they have like 8 projects about to be released) will be dual-statted for Savage Worlds.
And in case you don't know - the *reason* I even mention Rifts is because Rifts is *radically* more powerful in context than most things you'd deal with in Pathfinder. The Tarrasque would be a major issue, but would likely be dealt with in relatively short order. It would be one Kaiju+ among **many** other horrible things running around that setting. The chassis upon which Savage Rifts is built can be deconstructed whole or in part to leverage into your high-level Savage Pathfinder games with very little effort. Because the system is designed that way.
So imagine if Pathfinder had rules for 20th-30th level play (and your brain didn't melt from considering those 10-page stat-blocs) but it was actually PLAYABLE not just for kicks and giggles, but for prolonged campaigning. Your characters would START at that power-level and you'd run your campaign normally. Yeah that's how flexible and scalable Savage Worlds is. It's not perfect, but it's damn fine gaming with ridiculous low overhead.